The Mirror of Antiquity

In The Mirror of Antiquity, Caroline Winterer uncovers the lost world of American women's classicism during its glory days from the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Overturning the widely held belief that classical learning and political ideals were relevant only to men, she follows the lives of four generations of American women through their diaries, letters, books, needlework, and drawings, demonstrating how classicism was at the center of their experience as mothers, daughters, and wives. Importantly, she pays equal attention to women from the North and from the South, and to the ways that classicism shaped the lives of black women in slavery and freedom.In a strikingly innovative use of both texts and material culture, Winterer exposes the neoclassical world of furnishings, art, and fashion created in part through networks dominated by elite women. Many of these women were at the center of the national experience. Here readers will find Abigail Adams, teaching her children Latin and signing her letters as Portia, the wife of the Roman senator Brutus; the Massachusetts slave Phillis Wheatley, writing poems in imitation of her favorite books, Alexander Pope's Iliad and Odyssey; Dolley Madison, giving advice on Greek taste and style to the U.S. Capitol's architect, Benjamin Latrobe; and the abolitionist and feminist Lydia Maria Child, who showed Americans that modern slavery had its roots in the slave societies of Greece and Rome. Thoroughly embedded in the major ideas and events of the time—the American Revolution, slavery and abolitionism, the rise of a consumer society—this original book is a major contribution to American cultural and intellectual history.

The Mirror of Antiquity

"The Mirror of Antiquity is the best treatment of American women and the classics from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century ever published. Lucid, thoughtful, and well-researched, it is certain to become its own object of study, a classic."

- Common-place

The Mirror of Antiquity

"Caroline Winterer has produced an impressive piece of scholarship that casts those early American women with whom we are so familiar in a new light and causes us to view them with, perhaps, a more 'classical' eye than we have before.... The strength of Winterer's work lies in the her research's enormity and her compelling argument that American women did find ways 'through classicism' to be active participants in American society, either culturally or through activism and reform."

- History: Reviews of New Books

The Mirror of Antiquity

"Equally conversant in intellectual history and material culture, Winterer offers a compelling portrait of the 'superliterate' women at the top of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American society.... Her sparkling, concise prose animates the book throughout, and generous illustration permits the reader to follow Winterer's visual insights. To use the language that her subjects would have known, these attributes make The Mirror of Antiquity at once instructive and entertaining to read."

- Scott Casper, Early American Literature

The Mirror of Antiquity

"Caroline Winterer uncovers and deftly delineates a women's world of classicism that paralleled and intersected the more well-known evocations of Greece and Rome used by the male founders. Employing clothes, needlework, and furnishings, as well as documents, as her sources, Winterer unveils the compelling historical paradox of American women reaching back to the ancient world to stake their claim to a modern world."

- Catherine Allgor, University of California, Riverside

The Mirror of Antiquity

"In The Mirror of Antiquity, Caroline Winterer affirms the broad currency of classicism in the century following the American Revolution, revealing women's contradictory relations to the texts, images, and objects inspired by ancient Greece and Rome. She shows us how the culture of classicism simultaneously embraced and excluded women and how different groups of women—abolitionist and slaveholding, erudite and merely educated—laid claim to different strands of this wide-ranging discourse. Stylishly written, The Mirror of Antiquity offers fresh insights into the gendered connections between imaginative worlds and political ideologies."

- Catherine E. Kelly, University of Oklahoma

The Mirror of Antiquity

"This charming book reminds us once again how protean is the legacy of classicism. It focuses on American women in the period spanning the huge upheavals of the War for Independence and the Civil War, and shows in vivid cameos how classical models provided an arena of both possibility and circumscription for women in all walks of life—from drawing rooms to slave quarters. The classics served as an ideological Trojan horse, enabling discourse on women's rights as readily as a justification of

slaveholding. And the very haphazardness of women's classical education led to extraordinary creative eclecticism. Here are many enticing glimpses through the back door of history, from the inspiration of the 'sable Muse,' Phillis Wheatley, to the surprising significance of the 'sopha.' The Mirror of Antiquity is a nuanced, complex, and engagingly narrated work."